Agenda for Today - March 17, 2008

1. Update on where groups are for your Action Research Project (post a quick summary on our class blog)

• Questions of Interest
• Ideas for collecting data
• Observations/Findings/Reflections thus far

2. Reflections from last month's readings and the recent blog postings

3. Thinking about Aspects of Critical Evaluation
(handouts include Recent Findings: STI Mar2008 CritEval.pdf and Instructional Ideas: STI CritEvalPart2.pdf)

• Relevancy - information's level of importance to a particular reading purpose or stated information need
• Accuracy - the extent to which information contains factual and updated details that can be verified by consulting alternative and/or primary sources
• Reliability - the information's level of trustworthiness based on information about the author and the publishing body (most and least reliable)
• Commercial Bias - the extent to which information appears to be influenced by commercial interests for or against a certain product
• Bias/Perspective - the extent to which information appears to be influenced by a particular set of interests or point of view